Marketing is like a muscle – work it regularly and it will become stronger.  Ignore it and it will waste away.  In other words, don’t expect your marketing to be effective and yield the results you need if you only do some now and again.  Little and often works much better than a burst every few months.

I love Google Analytics – not only is it free (and there is not much in the world that you can say that about!) but it provides a wide range of information about your website – far more than just: “How many people visited my site today?” (although this can be very interesting).

I regularly monitor the number of visitors to my site and recognise spikes that coincide with additional marketing activity, such as blog posts, e-newsletter, radio appearances etc.  This helps me determine which activities work and which didn’t work as well.  But this is not enough for me and Google Analytics helps in far more ways.

For example, I can track:

• sources of traffic, i.e. how many visits were generated from Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc;
• what keywords entered into the search engines actually drove traffic to my site;
• the top landing pages, i.e. the pages that traffic arrived at from links on other sites – it is important to remember that not all traffic arrives on your home page;
• the top exit pages, i.e. which pages visitors last saw before clicking away from my site;
• the bounce rate – think of a trampoline and the visitor viewing one page and then bouncing off your site again.
• the most popular pages visited.

It is not enough to just have the stats to hand, you need to do something with that information and analyse what your data is telling you.

If you have a page that is popular, but that same page is also one of the top exit pages then this is telling you that visitors want to know what you have to say on that page but that it did not hook them in as a large proportion of these visitors left once they read the page – you need to rewrite the copy and make it more enticing.  If you have a sales page that is high on the list of entrance and exit pages, with minimum sales, then you need to amend the copy to convince them to buy.  Conversely, if one of the top exit pages is your confirmed order page then that is a good thing.  If you have a sales page on your site that is not visited very often then you need to consider what else you can do to drive traffic to that page.

If you are spending a lot of time on LinkedIn and not much time on Facebook, but your stats tell you that Facebook generates more links – how will you interpret this data?  Do you decide to spend more time on Facebook to attract even more people to your website, or do you change what you have been doing on LinkedIn to try and encourage more people from that source?

What web stats package do you use?  I have tried quite a few others over the years – BraveNet, HitsLog, StatsCounter – and whereas they all have their good points, I always find myself returning to Google Analytics.  What about you?  Do you use a stats package?  if so, leave a comment below and tell readers which one and why you like it.

My most popular workshops at the moment are, without a doubt, those on social marketing.  In the half day workshop, for example, attendees are given a whistle-stop tour of the main social media platforms that could benefit their business and by the end of the session they are set up with profiles/accounts on these platforms, have been taught how to get started, given ideas of the content to publish and we have linked them together so an element of what they do is automated.

The workshops are limited to just 5 people at a time to ensure they each get my individual attention and the additional benefit of bringing along their own laptop means we can get straight down to setting up profiles and downloading applications on to their own machine so they are ready to rock-and-roll when they get back to their desk.  Don’t just take my word for it, Sue Bown of The Coaching Zone is just one of the happy campers I have trained so far and this is what she had to say:

I was lucky enough to attend a wonderful half-day training with Lindsey Collumbell of Bojangle Communications.  Lindsey packed so much information into the morning course, I came away with my head filled with so many answers to questions I had about Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, WordPress and so much more.  We were all at different levels with our use of social media, so our needs varied.  However, completely unflustered by this, Lindsey delivered solutions that worked for all of us. I would recommend this course to anyone who wants to know more about Social Media. The feature I particularly liked was being able to use my own PC to get hands-on experience and a practical solution that works for my business. (Sue Bown, The Coaching Zone)

To give you an idea of me, my style, and for a flavour of what I cover in my workshops / talks to organisations I have just received a video extract of the talk I gave at the Ladies at 11 Back-to-Business Conference.

I am just finalising dates for the 2012 programme of workshops so if you are interested in finding out when the next social marketing one will be, click on the blue button at the top left hand corner of this site and let me have your details.

12 Days of Christmas Marketing Tip 11

Do you have a marketing plan?  If not, you are missing a trick … are you an Alice or the Cheshire Cat?

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to” said the cat.

“I don’t much care where …” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go” said the cat.

If, like Alice, you don’t much care in which direction your company goes then knee-jerk (or ad-hoc) marketing will serve you well.  If, on the other hand, you know where you want your company to be then a marketing plan will get you there.

For more in-depth information on what to do to create an effective marketing plan have a read of this article – Plan, plan and plan again.

12 Days of Christmas Marketing Tip 7

Vary your approach to reach your target audience/s in as many ways as possible – the mantra is integrate integrate integrate.

By having an integrated approach when reaching (potential) customers you make sure you reach them in as many ways as possible. Don’t just rely on one marketing activity at a time – you need to build a relationship in order for (potential) customers to feel comfortable about who you are and what you do and be more likely to buy from you.

One news release sent out in isolation may get you coverage in the media. If you reinforce what you have to say with a direct mail (try to include a special offer to make them take notice), also send out your e-newsletter and post on a few relevant online forums, you are creating more opportunities for someone to see or hear about you which will mean they will be more likely to buy from you as they recognise who you are.

12 Days of Christmas Marketing Tip 2

Create links that the search engines like – when creating links, either to internal pages on your site, or to pages on other sites, make sure you include keywords or phrases in the link text. The text you include in hyperlinks is used by the search engines to determine the value of a web page

Using the text: “Click here for more information on our SEO training courses” will give you no search engine value.  However, the text: “Click for more information on our SEO training courses” (if SEO training courses is a keyphrase for you) will be far more beneficial when helping the search engines crawl around your site.

Marketing is a key factor in the success of your business. To be successful you need to have established who your customers are, how you reach them, how you win new customers and how you keep existing customers happy. On top of all this you need to constantly review and analyse what you do to make sure you stay ahead of the competition. An effective marketing plan will cover all of these points and be linked to, and complement, your overall business strategy.